Abercrombie & Fitch’s No-Go Logo

It might come as a surprise to readers born in the seventies or eighties that the Abercrombie & Fitch logo is no longer a marker of popularity and, in fact, hasn’t been one for years. Anyone who attended a suburban middle school two decades ago or so will recall Abercrombie’s mall stores, decorated with enormous photographs of some guy’s abs and staffed, exclusively, it seemed, by blonde, stone-faced waifs. The lights were dim. All of this gave the stores—and the clothes they sold, emblazoned with the Abercrombie name—an air of exclusivity that, in retrospect, seems preposterous for a company best known for selling rumpled flannels and T-shirts.

And now that era is over. Since the late aughts, teens have been spending far less at the stores known as the three As—Abercrombie, American Eagle, and Aéropostale—and have been especially disinterested in the T-shirts and hoodies with logos that once made the stores so popular. They’re shopping instead at places like H&M, Zara, and Forever 21, which are adept at copying fashions from the runway and selling them cheaply. On a conference call on Thursday, Abercrombie’s C.E.O., Mike Jeffries, told analysts and reporters, “In the spring season, we’re looking to take the North American logo business to practically nothing.” (The logo “will remain a factor in the rest of the world,” Jeffries noted.) Instead, Abercrombie intends to focus on “fashion,” he said.

To understand what has changed since the late nineties and early aughts, I spoke with Steph Wissink, an analyst at Piper Jaffray who, for more than a decade, has compiled reports on where teen-agers are spending their money. In the late nineties and early aughts, she said, Abercrombie was the most popular brand among teens. During that time, Abercrombie thrived by exalting conformity. All the popular kids were wearing the Abercrombie logo, the message went, so if you wanted to be one of them, you’d better wear the logo, too.

Jeffries, the C.E.O., was as enthusiastic about this message as anyone. In a 2006 Salon profile, he told Benoit Denizet-Lewis that “in every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends.” He went on, “Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny.”

This attitude started working against Abercrombie during the recession, around 2008. That’s when Wissink started noticing fewer Abercrombie logos in the schools she visited; people (young, old, fat, skinny) could no longer afford Abercrombie’s prices for T-shirts and hoodies. Around this the time, H&M and Forever 21 started to thrive by selling super-cheap, accessible runway knockoffs. The economy has recovered since then, but the turn toward “fast fashion” proved durable.

Only in the past year or so has Abercrombie started to change its strategy. Late last year, the retailer announced that it would start selling plus-sized clothes (which, inevitably, meant the resurrection, in the press, of Jeffries’s 2006 comment), along with shoes. In January, Abercrombie stripped Jeffries of his title as chairman of the board, bowing to pressure from investors. In June, Sapna Maheshwari pointed out at BuzzFeed that Abercrombie had even changed how it described itself in a government filing: in the past, it had called itself “the essence of privilege and casual luxury”; in a more recent filing, that language was gone, with the brand now representing “the essence of laidback sophistication with an element of simplicity.”

But these changes, along with the removal of the Abercrombie logo, may not be enough to bring customers back. For one thing, its prices are still much higher than those of H&M and Forever 21. (Abercrombie’s Web site, on a recent visit, advertised twenty-five-dollar sweatpants, which seemed affordable enough until I visited H&M’s site and learned about its Labor Day deals starting at $4.95.)

Perhaps relatedly, kids today seem less interested in the aesthetic of conformity-through-consumption that Jeffries, and the company, still seem to advocate. They have other ways of expressing who they are—through the language they use on social media, for example. While the early aughts were a period of conformity, Wissink said, kids now prefer to show that they’re different from others. To the extent that they do use purchases as social signifiers, they pay attention to tech brands—the latest iPhone or pair of headphones—far more than to clothing lines.

As part of Wissink’s research, she and her colleagues visit high schools and talk to the students about their preferences. “Ten years ago, I could walk into an auditorium of two hundred kids, I could turn my back and tell them to switch seats and scramble.” Then, she said, she would turn around and guess which kids belonged to the same social groups according to what they were wearing—usually with great success. “Today,” she said, “it’s next to impossible.” Why should a teen send subtle signals about her identity by dressing in a certain brand when she can define herself explicitly on Facebook and Instagram?

Vauhini Vara, the former business editor of newyorker.com, is a contributing writer for the site. She is also an O. Henry Prize-winning fiction writer, with stories published in Tin House, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere.